PLAY IT AGAIN, PAC-MAN
by
CHARLES BERNSTEIN
State University of New York at Albany
_Postmodern Culture_ v.2 n.1 (September, 1991)
Copyright (c) 1991 by Charles Bernstein, all
rights reserved. This text may be freely shared
among individuals, but it may not be republished
in any medium without express written consent from
the author and advance notification of the
editors.
[1] Your quarter rolls into the slot and you are tossed,
suddenly and as if without warning, into a world of
controllable danger. Your "man" is under attack and you
must simulate his defense, lest humanity perish and another
quarter is required to renew the quest.
[2] Drop in, turn on, tune out.
[3] The theories of video games abound: poststructuralist,
neomarxian, psychoanalytic, and puritanical interpretations
are on hand to guide us on our journey through the
conceptual mazes spawned by the phenomenon. Acting out male
aggression. A return, for adolescent boys, to the site of
mom's body. Technological utopia. As American as
auto-eroticism. The best introduction to computer
programming. No more than an occasion for loitering in
seedy arcades. A new mind-obliterating technodrug.
Marvelous exercise of hand-eye coordination. Corrupter of
youth. Capital entertainment for the whole family. Not
since the advent of TV has an entertainment medium been
subjected to such wildly ambivalent reactions nor such
skyrocketing sales.
[4] If the Depression dream was a chicken in every pot,
today's middle class adolescent's dream is a video game in
every TV.
[5] More and faster: better graphics and faster action, so
fast you transcend the barriers of gravity, so vivid it's
realer than real.
[6] A surprising amount of the literature on video games
has concerned the social context of the games: arcade
culture, troubled youth, vocational training for tomorrow's
_Top Gun_. So much so that these scenarios seem to have
become a part of video game culture: Nerdy kid who can't get
out a full sentence and whose social skills resemble
Godzilla's is the Star of the arcade; as taciturn as a Gary
Cooper's Sheriff, he gets the job done without designer
sweaters or the girl.
[7] In the Saturday Night Fever of Computer Wizardry,
achievement with your joy stick is the only thing that
counts; success is solitary, objectively measured,
undeniable.
[8] Or, say, a 1980s Horatio Alger. A failure at school,
marginal drug experimenter, hanging out on the wrong side of
the tracks with a no-future bunch of kids, develops $30 a
day video game habit, can't unplug from the machine without
the lights going out in his head. Haunts the arcade till
all hours, till the cops come in their beeping cruisers,
bounding into the mall like the beeping spaceships on the
video screen, and start to check IDs, seems some parents
complained they don't know where Johnny is and it's pushing
two. Cut to: young man in chalk-striped suit vice-prez for
software devel. of Data Futurians, Inc. of Electronic
Valley, California; pulling down fifty thou in his third
year after dropping out of college. (Though the downside
sequel has him, at 30, working till two every morning,
divorced, personal life not accessible at this time, waiting
for new data to be loaded, trouble reading disk drive.)
[9] Like the story boards of the games, the narratives that
surround video games seem to promise a very American ending:
Redemption though the technology of perseverance and the
perseverance of technology. Salvation from social
degeneracy (alien menace) comes in the form of squeaky clean
high tech (no moving parts, no grease). Turns out, no big
surprise, that the Alien that keeps coming at you in these
games is none other than Ourselves, split off and on the war
path.
[10] The combination of low culture and high technology is
one of the most fascinating social features of the video
game phenomenon. Computers were invented as super drones to
do tasks no human in her or his right mind (much less left
brain) would have the patience, or the perseverance, to
manage. Enter multitask electronic calculators which would
work out obsessively repetitive calculations involving
billions of individual operations, calculations that if you
had to do by hand would take you centuries to finish,
assuming you never stopped for a Coke or a quick game of
Pac-Man. Now our robot drones, the ones designed to take
all the boring jobs, become the instrument for libidinal
extravaganzas devoid of any socially productive component.
Video games are computers neutered of purpose, liberated
from functionality. The idea is intoxicating; like playing
with the help on their night off, except the leisure
industry begins to outstrip the labors of the day as video
games become the main interface between John Q. and Beth B.
Public and the computer.
[11] Instruments of labor removed from work-a-day tasks, set
free to roam the unconscious, dark spaces of the Imaginary--
dragons and assault asteroids, dreadful losses and
miraculous reincarnations.
[12] If a typewriter could talk, it probably would have very
little to say; our automatic washers are probably not hiding
secret dream machines deep inside their drums.
[13] But these microchips really blow you away.
[14] Uh, err, um, oh. TILT!
[15] Okay, then, let's slow down and unpack these equations
one by one, or else this will begin to resemble the assault
on our ability to track that seems so much at the heart of
the tease of the games themselves.
SPENDING TIME OR KILLING IT?
[16] The arcade games are designed, in part, to convince
players to part, and keep parting, with their quarters.
This part of the action feels like slot-machine gambling,
with the obvious difference that there is no cash pay off,
only more time on line. Staying plugged in, more time to
play, is the fix. The arcade games are all about buying
time and the possibility of extending the nominal, intensely
atomized, 30-second (or so) minimum play to a duration that
feels, for all impractical purposes, unbounded. Clearly the
dynamic of the ever-more popular home games is different
enough that the two need to be considered as quite distinct
social phenomena, even though they share the same medium.
[17] Like sex, good play on an arcade video game not only
earns extra plays but also extends and expands the length of
the current play, with the ultimate lure of an unlimited
stretch of time in which the end bell never tolls: a freedom
from the constraints of time that resembles the temporal
plenitude of uninterrupted live TV (or close-circuit video
monitoring) as well as the timeless, continuous present of
the personal computer (PC). In contrast, a film ticket or
video rental buys you just 90 or 120 minutes of "media," no
extensions (as opposed to reruns) possible. Meanwhile, the
home video game, by allowing longer play with greater
skills, simulates the temporal economy of the arcade product
while drastically blunting the threat of closure, since on
the home version it costs nothing to replay.
[18] Video games create an artificial economy of scarcity in
a medium characterized by plenitude. In one of the most
popular genres, you desperately fight to prolong your
staying power which is threatened by alien objects that you
must shoot down. There's no intrinsic reason that the
threat of premature closure should drive so many of these
games; for example, if your quarter always bought two
minutes of play the effect of artificial scarcity would
largely disappear. Is this desire to postpone closure a
particular male drive, suggesting a peculiarly male fear?
It may be that the emphasis on the overt aggression of a
number of the games distracts from seeing other dynamics
inherent in video game formats.
[19] Another dynamic of the arcade games is the ubiquitous
emphasis on scoring. These games are not open-ended; not
only do you try to accumulate the most points in order to
extend play and win bonus games but also to compete with the
machine's lifetime memory of best-ever scores. If
achievement-directed scoring suggests sex as opposed to
love, games more than play, then it seems relevant to
consider this a central part of the appeal of video games.
[20] An economy of scarcity suggests goal-oriented behavior:
the desire for accumulation; this is what George Bataille
has dubbed a "restricted" economy, in contrast to an
unrestricted or "general" economy, which involves exchange
or loss or waste or discharge. The drive to accumulate
capital and commodities is the classic sign of a restricted
economy. Potlatch (the festive exchange of gifts) or other
rituals or carnivals of waste ("A hellava wedding!," "Boy,
what a Bar Mitzvah!") suggest a general economy.
[21] While the dominant formats and genres of video games
seem to involve a restricted economy, the social context of
the games seems to suggest features of a general--
unrestricted--economy. For while the games often mime the
purposive behavior of accumulation/acquisition, they are
played out in a context that stigmatizes them as wastes of
time, purposeless, idle, even degenerate.
[22] These considerations link up video games with those
other games, in our own and other cultures, whose social
"function" is to celebrate waste, abandon, excess; though
the carnival or orgiastic rite is clearly something that is
repressed in a society, like ours, where the Puritan ethic
stills hold powerful sway. What redeems many sports from
being conceived as carnivals of waste is the emphasis on
athletics (%improvement% of the body) and the forging of
team or group or community spirit (%building% a community,
learning %fair% play)--two compensatory features
conspicuously absent from solitary, suggestively
antiphysical video gaming.
[23] In a society in which the desire for general economy is
routinely sublimated into utilitarian behaviors, the lure of
video games has to be understood as, in part, related to
their sheer unproductivity. Put more simply, our
unrestricted play is constantly being channeled into
goal-directed games; how appealing then to find a game whose
essence seems to be totally useless play. Yet it would be a
mistake to think of the erotic as wed to de-creative flows
rather than pro-creative formations: both are in play, at
work. Thus the synthesis of play and games that
characterizes most available video games addresses the
conflictual nature of our responses to eros and labor, play
and work.
[24] So what's really being shot down or gobbled up in so
many of the popular games? Maybe the death wish played out
in these games is not a simulation at all; maybe it's time
that's being killed or absorbed--real-life productive time
that could be better "spent" elsewhere.
IF THE MASSAGE IS THE MEDIUM AND THE GENRE IS THE MESSAGE,
WHO'S MINDING THE STORE?
[25] Like movies, especially in the early period, video
games are primarily characterized by their genre. The
earliest arcade video game, _Pong_, from 1971, is an arcade
version of ping-pong, and so the progenitor of a series of
more sophisticated games based on popular sports, including
_Atari Football_, _Track and Field_, _720 [degrees]_
(skateboarding), and _Pole Position_ (car racing). (Perhaps
driving simulation games are a genre of their own; they
certainly have the potential to be played in an open-ended
way, outside any scoring: just to drive fast and take the
curves.)
[26] Quest or "fantasy" adventures, typically using a maze
format, is another very poplar genre, especially in the home
version. Arcade versions include _Dragon's Lair_,
_Gauntlet_, and _Thayer's Quest_. Dragons, wizards, and
warriors are often featured players, and each new level of
the game triggers more complex action, as the protagonist
journeys toward an often magical destination at the end of a
series of labyrinths. In the home versions, where there may
be up to a dozen levels, or scenes, the narrative can become
increasingly elaborate. Still, the basis of this genre is
getting the protagonist through a series (or maze) of
possibly fatal mishaps. In its simplest form, these games
involve a single protagonist moving toward a destination,
the quest being to complete the labyrinth, against all odds.
So we have Pac-Man gobbling to avoid being gobbled, or
_Donkey Kong_'s Mario trying to save his beloved from a
family of guerrillas who roll barrels at him, or, in
_Berzerk_, humanoids who must destroy all the pursuing
robots before reaching the end of the maze.
[27] But the genre that most characterizes the arcade game
is the war games in which successive waves of enemy
projectiles must be shot down or blown up by
counterprojectiles controlled by joystick, push button, or
track ball. Some of the more famous of these games included
_Star Wars_ (a movie tie-in), _Space Invaders_ (squadrons of
alien craft swoop in from outer space while the player
fights it out with one lone spacecraft that is locked in a
fixed position), _Asteroids_ (weightless, drifting shooter,
lost in space, tries to blast way through meteor showers and
occasional scout ship), _Defender_ (wild variety of space
aliens to dodge/shoot down in spaceman rescue), _Galaxian_
(invaders break ranks and take looping dives in their
attacks), _Stratovox_ (stranded astronauts on alien planet),
_Centipede_ (waves of insects), _Missile Command_ (ICBM
attack), _Robotron: 2084_ (robots against humanity),
_Seawolf_ (naval action), _Zaxxon_ (enemy-armed flying
fortress), _Battlezone_ (so accurately simulated tank
warfare, so the press kit says, that the Army used it for
training), and, finally, the quite recent "total
environment" sit-down, pilot's view war games--_Strike
Avenger_, _Afterburner_, and _Star Fire_.
[28] A related, newer genre is the martial arts fighting-man
video games, such as _Double Dragon_ and _Karate Champ_,
where star wars have come home to earth in graphically
violent street wars reminiscent of Bruce Lee's mystically
alluring Kung Fu action movies: another example of film and
video game versions of the same genre.
[29] Discussions of video games rarely distinguish between
medium and genre, probably because the limited number of
genres so far developed dominate the popular conception of
the phenomenon. But to imagine that video games are
restricted to shoot-'em-ups, quest adventures, or sports
transcriptions would be equivalent to imagining, seventy
years ago, that the _Perils of Pauline_ or slapstick
revealed the essence of cinema.
[30] A medium of art has traditionally been defined as the
material or technical means of expression; thus, paint on
canvas, lithography, photography, film, and writing are
different media; while detective stories, science fiction,
rhymed verse, or penny dreadfuls are genres of writing.
This is altogether too neat, however. Since we learn what a
medium is through instances of its use in genres, the cart
really comes before the horse, or anyway, the medium is a
sort of projected, or imaginary, constant that is actually
much more socially and practically constituted than may at
first seem apparent.
[31] When trying to understand the nature of different
media, it is often useful to think about what characterizes
one medium in a way that distinguishes it from all other
media--what is its essence, what can it do that no other
medium can do? Stanley Cavell has suggested that the
essence of the two predominant moving-image media--TV and
movies--are quite distinct. The experience of film is
voyeuristic--I %view% a world ("a succession of automatic
world projections") from a position of being unseen, indeed
unseeable. TV, in contrast, involves not viewing but
%monitoring% of events as its basic mode of perception--live
broadcast of news or sports events being the purest examples
of this property.
[32] It's helpful to distinguish the video display monitor
from TV-as-medium. Several media use the video monitor for
non-TV purposes. One distinction is between %broadcast% TV
and VCR technologies that, like PCs, use the television
screen for non-event-monitoring functions. Video games,
then, are a moving-image medium distinct from TV and film.
[33] In distinguishing medium and genre, it becomes useful
to introduce a middle term, _format_. Coin-op and
home-cassette video games are one type of--hardware--format
distinction I have in mind; but another--software--
difference would be between, for example, scored and
open-ended games, time-constrained and untimed play.
Similar or different genres could then be imagined for these
different formats.
THE COMPUTER UNCONSCIOUS
[34] The medium of video games is the CPU--the computer's
central processing unit. Video games share this medium with
PCs. Video games and PCs are different (hardware) formats
of the same medium. Indeed, a video game is a computer that
is set up (dedicated) to play only one program.
[35] The experiential basis of the computer-as-medium is
%prediction and control% of a limited set of variables. The
fascination with all computer technology--gamesware or
straightware--is figuring out all the permutations of a
limited set of variables. This accounts for the obsessively
repetitive behavior of both PC hackers and games players
(which mimes the hyperrepetiveness of computer processing).
As a computer games designer remarked to me, working with
computers is the only thing she can do for hours a day
without noticing the time going by: a quintessentially
absorbing activity.
[36] Computers, because they are a new kind of medium, are
likely to change the basic conception of what a medium is.
This is not because computers are uniquely interactive--that
claim, if pursued, becomes hollow quite quickly. Rather,
computers provide a different definition of a medium: not a
physical support but an operating environment. Perhaps it
overstates the point to talk about computer consciousness
but the experiential dynamic in operating computers--whether
playing games or otherwise--has yet to receive a full
accounting. Yet the fascination of relating to this alien
consciousness is at the heart of the experience of PCs as
much as video games.
[37] Video games are the purest manifestation of computer
consciousness. Liberated from the restricted economy of
purpose or function, they express the inner, nonverbal world
of the computer.
[38] What is this world like? Computers, including video
games, are relatively invariant in their response to
commands. This means that they will always respond in the
same way to the same input but also that they demand that
the input be precisely the same to produce the same results.
For this reason, any interaction with computers is extremely
circumscribed and affectless (which is to say, all the
affect is a result of transference and projection).
Computers don't respond or give forth, they process or
calculate.
[39] Computers are either on or off, you're plugged in or
your out of the loop. There is a kind of visceral click in
your brain when the screen lights up with "System Ready," or
your quarter triggers the switch and the game comes on line,
that is unrelated to other media interactions such as
watching movies or TV, reading, or viewing a painting.
Moreover--and this is crucial to the addictive attraction so
many operators feel--the on-ness of the computer is alien to
any sort of relation we have with people or things or
nature, which are always and ever possibly present, but
can't be toggled on and off in anything like this peculiar
way. The computer infantalizes our relation to the
external, re-presenting the structure of the infant's world
as described by Piaget, where objects seem to disappear when
you turn your back to them or close your eyes. For you know
when you turn your PC on it will be just like you left it:
nothing will have changed.
[40] TV is for many people simulated company, freely flowing
with an unlimited supply of "stuff" that fills up "real
time." Computers, in contrast, seem inert and atemporal,
vigilant and self-contained. It's as if all their data is
simultaneously and immediately available to be called up.
It is unnecessary to go through any linear or temporal
sequence to find a particular bit of information. No
searching on fast forward as in video, or waiting as in TV,
or flipping pages as in a book: you specify and instantly
access. When you are into it, time disappears, only to
become visible again during "down time." Even those who
can't conceive that they will care about speed become
increasingly irritated at computer operations that take more
than a few seconds to complete. For the non-operator, it
may seem that a 10-second wait to access data is
inconsequential. But the computer junkie finds such waits
an affront to the medium's utopian lure of timeless and
immediate access, with no resistance, no gravitational
pull--no sweat, no wait, no labor on the part of the
computer: a dream of weightless instantaneousness,
continuous presentness. The fix of speed for the computer
or video game player is not from the visceral thrill of
fastness, as with racing cars, where the speed is physically
felt. The computer ensnares with a Siren's song of time
stopping, ceasing to be experienced, transcended. Speed is
not an end in itself, a roller coaster ride, but a means to
escape from the very sensation of speed or duration: an
escape from history, waiting, embodied space.
THE ANXIETY OF CONTROL/THE CONTROL OF ANXIETY
[41] Invariance, accuracy, and synchronicity are not
qualities that generally characterize human information
processing, although they are related to certain
idealizations of our reasoning processes. Certainly,
insofar as a person took on these characterizations, he or
she would frighten: either lobotomized or paranoid. In this
sense, the computer can again be seen as an alien form of
consciousness; our interactions with it are unrelated to the
forms of communication to which we otherwise are accustomed.
[42] Many people using computers and video games experience
a surprisingly high level of anxiety; controlled anxiety is
one of the primary "hooks" into the medium.
[43] Since so many of the video game genres highlight
paranoid fantasies, it's revealing to compare these to the
paranoia and anxiety inscribed in PC operating systems.
Consider the catastrophic nature of numerous PC error
messages: Invalid sector, allocation error, sector not
found, attempted write-protect violation, disk error,
divide overflow, disk not ready, invalid drive
specification, data error, format failure, incompatible
system size, insufficient memory, invalid parameter, general
failure, bad sector, fatal error, bad data, sector not
found, track bad, disk unusable, unrecoverable read error;
or the ubiquitous screen prompts: "Are you sure?" and
"Abort, Retry, Ignore?"
[44] The experience of invoking and avoiding these,
sometimes "fatal" errors, is not altogether unlike the
action of a number of video games. Just consider how these
standard PC software operating terms suggest both scenarios
and action of many video games and at the same time
underscore some of the ontological features of the medium:
%escape% and %exit% and %save% functions ("You must escape
from the dungeon, exit to the next level and save the
nuclear family"), %path support% (knowing your way through
the maze), data %loss%/data %recovery% (your "man" only
disappears if he gets hit three times), %defaults% (are not
in the stars but in ourselves), %erase% (liquidate,
disappear, destroy, bombard, obliterate), %abandon% (ship!),
%unerase% (see data recovery), delete (kill me but don't
delete me), %searches% (I always think of John Ford's _The
Searchers_, kind of the opposite of perhaps the most
offensive of video games, "Custer's Revenge"), and of
course, %back-ups% (i.e. the cavalry's on its way, or else:
a new set of missiles is just a flick of the wrist away).
[45] The pitch of computer paranoia is vividly demonstrated
in the cover copy for a program designed to prevent your
hard drive from %crashing%: "Why your hard disk may be only
seconds away from total failure! Be a real hero! Solve
hard disk torture and grief. You don't need to reformat.
You don't need to clobber data. How much these errors
already cost you in %unrecoverable% data, time, torture,
money, missing deadlines, schedule delays, poor performance,
damage to business reputation, etc.."
[46] Loss preventable only by constant saving is one PC
structural metaphor that seems played out in video games.
Another one, though perhaps less metaphoric than
phenomenological, revolves around %location%. Here it's not
loss, in the sense of being blipped out, but rather being
lost--dislocation--as in how to get from one place to
another, or getting your bearings so that the move you make
with the controls corresponds with what you see on the
far-from-silver screen. Or else the intoxicating anxiety of
disorientation: vertigo, slipping, falling, tumbling....
[47] What's going on? The dark side of uniformity and
control is an intense fear of failure, of crashing, of
disaster, of down time. Of not getting it right, of getting
lost, of losing control. Since the computer doesn't make
mistakes, if something goes wrong, it must be something in
you. How many times does an operator get a new program and
run it through just to see how it works, what it can do,
what the glitches are, what the action is. Moving phrases
around in multiple block operations may not be so different
from shooting down asteroids. Deleting data on purpose or
by mistake may be something like gobbling up little
illuminated blips on the display screen of a game. And
figuring out how a new piece of software works by making
slight mistakes that the computer rejects--because there's
only one optimum way to do something--may be like learning
to get from a 30-second Game Over to bonus points.
[48] If films offer voyeuristic pleasures, video games
provide vicarious thrills. You're not peeking into a world
in which you can't be seen, you are acting in a world by
means of tokens, designated hitters, color-coded dummies,
polymorphous stand-ins. The much-admired interactiveness of
video games amounts to less than it might appear given the
very circumscribed control players have over their "men."
Joy sticks and buttons (like keyboards or mice) allow for a
series of binary operations; even the most complex games
allows for only a highly limited amount of player control.
Narrowing down the field of possible choices to a manageable
few is one of the great attractions of the games, in just
the way that a film's ability to narrow down the field of
possible vision to a %view% is one of the main attractions
of the cinema.
[49] Video games offer a narrowed range of choices in the
context of a predictable field of action. Because the games
are so mechanically predictable, and context invariant,
normal sorts of predictive judgments based on situational
adjustments are unnecessary and indeed a positive hindrance.
The rationality of the system is what makes it so unlike
everyday life and therefore such a pleasurable release from
everyday experience. With a video game, if you do the same
thing in the same way it will always produce the same
results. Here is an arena where a person can have some real
control, an illusion of power, as "things" respond to the
snap of our fingers, the flick of our wrists. In a world
where it is not just infantile or adolescent but all too
human to feel powerless in the face of bombarding events,
where the same action never seems to produce the same
results because the contexts are always shifting, the
uniformity of stimulus and response in video games can be
exhilarating.
[50] In the social world of our everyday lives repetition is
near impossible if often promised. You can never utter the
same sentence twice not only technically, in the sense of
slight acoustic variation, but semantically, in that it
won't mean the same thing the second time around, won't
always command the same effect. With video games, as with
all computers, you can return to the site of the same
problem, the same anxiety, the same blockage and get exactly
the same effect in response to the same set of actions.
[51] In the timeless time of the video screen, where there
is no future and no history, just a series of events that
can be read in any sequence, we act out a tireless
existential drama of "now" time. The risks are simulated,
the mastery imaginary; only the compulsiveness is real.
PARANOIA OR PARAMILITARY?
[52] Paranoia literally means being beside one's mind.
Operating a computer or video game does give you the eerie
sensation of being next to something like a mind, something
like a mind that is doing something like responding to your
control. Yet one is not in control over the computer.
That's what's scary. Unlike your relation to your own body,
that is being in it and of it, the computer only simulates a
small window of operator control. The real controller of
the game is hidden from us, the inaccessible system core
that goes under the name of Read Only Memory (ROM), that's
neither hardware that you can touch or software that you can
change but "firmware." Like ideology, ROM is out of sight
only to control more efficiently.
[53] We live in a computer age in which the systems that
control the formats that determine the genres of our
everyday life are inaccessible to us. It's not that we
can't "know" a computer's mind in some metaphysical sense;
computers don't have minds. Rather, we are structurally
excluded from having access to the command structure: very
few know the language, and even fewer can (re)write it. And
even if we could rewrite these deep structures, the systems
are hardwired in such a way as to prevent such tampering.
In computer terms, to reformat risks losing all your data:
it is something to avoid at all costs. Playing video games,
like working with computers, we learn to adapt ourselves to
fixed systems of control. *All the adapting is ours*. No
wonder it's called good vocational training--but not just
for Air Force Mission Control or, more likely, the word
processing pool: the real training is for the new regulatory
environment we used to call 1984 until it came on line
without an off switch. After that we didn't call it
anything.
[54] In the machine age, a man or woman or girl or boy could
fix an engine, put in a new piston, clean a carburetor. A
film goer could look at a piece of film, or watch each frame
being pulled by sprockets across a beam of light at a speed
that he or she could imagine changing. A person operating a
threshing machine may have known all the basic principles,
and all the parts, that made it work. But how many of us
have even the foggiest notion--beyond something about binary
coding and microchips and overpriced Japanese memory--about
how video games or computers work?
[55] Yet, isn't that so much Romantic nonsense? Haven't
societies always run on secrets, hidden codes, inaccessible
scriptures? The origins of computers can be traced to
several sources. But it was military funding that allowed
for the development of the first computers. Moreover, the
first video game is generally considered to be _Spacewar_,
which was developed on mainframes at MIT in the late 1950s,
a byproduct of "strategic" R&D (research and development),
and a vastly popular "diversion" among the computer
scientists working with the new technology.
[56] The secrecy of the controlling ROM cannot be divorced
from the _Spacewar_ scenario that developed out of it, and
later inspired the dominant arcade video game genre.
Computer systems, and the games that are their product,
reveal a military obsession with secrecy and control, and
the related paranoia that secrets will be exposed or control
lost. Computers were designed not to solve problems, per
se, not to make visually entertaining graphics, not to
improve manuscript presentation or production, not to do
bookkeeping or facilitate searches through the Oxford
English Dictionary. Computers have their origins in the
need to simulate attack/response scenarios. To predict
trajectories of rockets coming at target and the trajectory
of rockets shot at these rockets. The first computers were
developed in the late 1940s to compute bombing trajectories.
When we get to the essence of the computer consciousness, if
that word can still be stomached for something so foreign to
all that we have known as consciousness, these origins have
an acidic sting.
[57] Which is not to say other fantasies, or purposes, can't
be spun on top of these origins. Programs and games may
subvert the command and control nature of computers, but
they can never fully transcend their disturbing, even
ominous, origins.
[58] So one more time around this maze. I've suggested that
the Alien that keeps coming at us in so many of these games
is ourselves, split off; that what we keep shooting down or
gobbling up or obliterating is our temporality: which is to
say that we have "erring" bodies, call them flesh, which is
to say we live in time, even history. And that the cost of
escaping history is paranoia: being beside oneself, split
off (which brings us back to where we started).
[59] But isn't the computer really the alien--the robot--
that is bombarding us with its world picture (not %view%),
its operating environment; that is always faster and more
accurate than we can ever hope to be; and that we can only
pretend to protect ourselves from, as in the Pyhrric
victory, sweet but unconvincing, when we beat the machine,
like so many John Henrys in dungarees and baseball hats,
hunching over a pleasure machine designed to let us win once
in while?
[60] The Luddites wanted to smash the machines of the
Industrial Revolution--and who can fail to see the touching
beauty in their impossible dream. But there can be no
returns, no repetitions, only deposits, depositions.
Perhaps the genius of these early video games--for the
games, like computers, are not yet even toddlers--is that
they give us a place to play out these neo-Luddite
sentiments: slay the dragon, the ghost in the machine, the
beserk robots. What we are fighting is the projection of
our sense of inferiority before our own creation. I don't
mean that the computer must always play us. Maybe, with
just a few more quarters, we can turn the tables.